Business-Ready Mashup Platforms

Even if you think mashups are too cutting-edge for your organization, check out this list from Dion Hinchcliffe, author of the blog Enterprise 2.0 at ZDNet. It's a fantastic round-up of 17 leading mashup platforms, with an eye toward what's useful for enterprises. Many of these platforms are designed to provide data integration, even with your CRM and ERP systems. Several also offer a strong mashup-SOA tie in, naturally. You may find you're pleasantly surprised when you see what's being offered and who's offering it.

In fact, only three of the 17 mashup platforms on Hinchcliffe's list use an open source license, suggesting this is so far a game for proprietary vendors.

Hinchcliffe makes a case for what mashups offer businesses and business users:

Mashups could theoretically allow business users to move -- when appropriate -- from their current so-called "end-user development tools" such as Microsoft Excel that are highly isolated and poorly integrated to much more deeply integrated models that are more Web-based and hence more open, collaborative, reusable, shareable, and in general make better use of existing sources of content and functionality. ... Tools that could let thousands of workers solve their situational software integration problems on the spot themselves, instead of waiting (sometimes forever) for IT to provide a solution, is indeed a potent vision.

My question is: Could this lead to silos of applications and data? After all, we're still dealing with the data silos created by Excel users who've squirreled away corporate information on self-created Excel spreadsheets hidden on their PCs. Is it such a stretch to imagine the same problem could happen with mashups?

I suppose the main barrier would be that it's easy to create an Excel spreadsheet and store it on your PC, where the network may or may not have access to it, whereas mashups are out there and meant to be public. But I could still imagine a problem years down the road where companies discover end users are running mashups on hosted servers, personal servers or somewhere deep on the corporate Intranet.

Hinchcliffe identifies five barriers to mashup adoption within the enterprise. Obviously, there's the security problem. But he also identifies problems that are pretty hard-wired within the business, such as the fact that most end users do not have "deep access" to enterprise services or information repositories.

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AS CEO of one of the 17 companies mentioned in Dion's mashup vendor list, we certainly agree there are issues that must be addressed in order for mashups to make the grade in the enterprise. There are a number of critical characteristics in enterprise mashups, which we've started to outline at http://blogs.jackbe.com/2007/07/defining-mashups.html. And these characteristics MUST be guiding principles in the resulting architecture and functions of enterprise-grade mashup software. One particularly meaningful comment by Dion in this was this statement: "...a credible management and maintenance story for IT departments that must support a flood of public end-user built and integrated apps, and last but certainly not least". We couldn't agreed more. The application of mashups in the enterprise is certainly a non-trivial endevour. Since its early days JackBe has tried to design and develop its Enterprise Mashup software to deal with the typical (and typically complex) enterprise requirements related to security, interoperability, ease of use, governance, reliability, and perhaps most important, a face' for the end user.We hope to see much more of this type of dialogue about Enterprise Mashups. This emerging technology needs this type of public conversation to give it the meaningful detail, description and relevance that will make it a lasting addition to the Enterprise IT toolbox. Mash on!PS: The original link to Dions post describing the 17 is http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=111. Reply

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